More Marines to Iraq; More NorK rocket fire; Op-ed: Move NATO brigades east; Pentagon calls on Watson; and a bit more.
The U.S. is sending an unspecified number of Marines to Iraq after suffering its second combat death in its war against the Islamic State group. “Staff Sgt. Louis F. Cardin, a 27-year-old field artilleryman with Battalion Landing Team, 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines, was killed at about 9 a.m. Saturday when Islamic State group militants launched a rocket attack on a coalition base in Makhmur,” Marine Corps Times reported. “Eight other Marines were injured in the attack on the newly established base, which is roughly 60 miles outside of Mosul.” ISIS’s media wing reportedly claimed the attacks began with two Grad rocket launches on the site.
The new contingent of troops come from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, currently operating with the Kearsarge Amphibious Ready Group in the 5th Fleet area of operations in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea and parts of the Indian Ocean.
But the minimal info contained in the Pentagon’s deployment announcement raised more questions and concerns (beyond the question of mere numbers) right off the bat, such as: What are these Marines going to do? Where are they headed—to Baghdad, or are they going to be forward-deployed? Other observers were less reserved about the perceived lack of transparency.
Russia wants to talk to the U.S. about cease-fire violations in Syria, but the U.S. says, “No—stick to the protocol.” Now Moscow is warning Washington it will resort to unilateral force to get its desired result, Reuters and the Associated Press report.
Elsewhere in the wider region, ISIS-linked fighters are believed to have been behind two attacks this weekend—one in Istanbul that killed at least four on Saturday, and another in Egypt when 13 police were killed in a mortar attack in the Sinai.
Also this weekend, Belgian security forces capped a four-month manhunt with the capture of 26-year-old Salah Abdeslam, along with “a lot of weapons” in a Brussels apartment on Friday. Officials claimed Abdeslam was on the verge of planning another major attack in Europe when officials raided his flat.
The Nov. 13 Paris attackers spent nearly two hours trying to speak to police after their deadly raid began, but they couldn’t navigate the automated menu, The New York Times writes on the heels of the release of a 55-page report on the attack from French counterterrorism police.
Pyongyang sent five more rockets or missiles or artillery shells (unclear what exactly they were) into the waters off the Korean peninsula this morning, South Korean officials said. “The unidentified projectiles were launched from south of the city of Hamhung and flew about 200 km (120 miles), landing in waters east of North Korea,” Reuters reports.
“On Sunday, North Korean state TV broadcast photos of leader Kim Jong Un supervising landing and defensive drills,” AP adds. “The photos showed artillery blazing, navy ships landing as shells fell nearby, and soldiers running with the national flag. North Korea has a history of photo manipulation and there was no way to verify the authenticity of the photos.”
Step aboard the USS John C. Stennis, where you’ll hear the “deafening roar of jet engines and an explosion of steam [as] an F-18 Super Hornet catapults off the deck of the aircraft carrier, and veers up into the sky.” That bit of color comes from CNN’s Ivan Watson, riding the “choppy, freezing waters to the east of the Korean peninsula” in joint U.S.-South Korean war games.
The U.S. is poised to deploy troops to the Phillippines for the first time in almost a quarter-century, The Wall Street Journal reports. “After two days of high-level talks in Washington, the Philippine Embassy there announced that four Philippine air bases and one army camp will be opened up to the U.S. under the terms of a defense pact signed in 2014… The deal, announced Friday, to send American forces to the Philippines had been held up for 18 months by a legal challenge, but in January the country’s Supreme Court ruled that the pact is constitutional and can go ahead. With the five bases now identified, the deployment of U.S. forces would follow “very soon,” U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Philip Goldberg said.”
China, naturally, is not pleased with the agreement, and claims the U.S. is guilty of the very thing it accuses Beijing of: “militarizing” the region around the South China Sea.
From Defense One
NATO should move two brigades east, and that’s just a start. The world is changing around the alliance; here’s what its leaders must do to keep up. The German Marshall Fund’s Michał Baranowski and Bruno Lété lay out a partial agenda for the alliance’s July summit, here.
Pentagon mapmakers are using social media to chart Syrians’ exodus. But officials admit the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's innovative approach has its limitations. From Nextgov, here.
Special report: the U.S. military’s new retirement system. Last year, Congress overhauled the system, moving away from the 20-year, all-or-nothing pension toward a more flexible — but complicated — arrangement. In a downloadable special report, Defense One explains what changed and how it will affect everything from wallets to service budgets. Get it (registration required), here.
Welcome to Monday’s edition of the D Brief, by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. On this day in 1940, the ocean liner Queen Mary departed New York on its first voyage as a converted troopship. Send your friends this link: http://get.defenseone.com/d-brief/. Got news? Let us know: the-d-brief@defenseone.com.
It’s everyone’s flight-deck nightmare: a 20-ton fighter jet breaks a landing cable, sending the broken ends whip-slicing into nearby people and planes. It happened Friday aboard the carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower, injuring eight sailors. By some miracle, none died. Virginian-Pilot has the story, here.
Here’s a video of a similar incident in 2003 aboard the George Washington.
A U.S. airman is in hot water after being filmed assaulting a protester at a Donald Trump rally this weekend in Tucson, Ariz. "I can confirm the individual depicted in these videos is an Airman assigned to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. We are reviewing the situation, fully cooperating with local authorities, and will take appropriate action," Air Force public affairs officials said in a written statement.
And in case there was any doubt about future similar events and how U.S. troops will be treated, the statement added: “All DOD members are authorized to participate in the political process in their personal capacity without implying any endorsement from the DOD. We believe wholeheartedly in our fellow Americans’ rights to express their views on political issues, and we strongly condemn any attempt to silence those views through force or violence.” That, here.
How much has national security shaped the presidential debates? Military Times’ Leo Shane III crunches the numbers to find nine mentions of “waterboarding” among Republicans, with none on the Democratic side—among many other numerical takeaways.
And speaking of waterboarding, “I spent the first three months of 2004 torturing Iraqi prisoners,” writes former U.S. defense contractor Eric Fair, who adds: “If I had the opportunity to speak to other interrogators and intelligence professionals, I would warn them about men like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.” It’s a blistering critique of the two GOP candidates’ takes on torture that’s worth the click, here.
Pentagon calls on Watson (this one, not that one) to help manage its procurement system. “For years, government agencies have tried to find ways to make the purchasing process more efficient. But now the Air Force has come to the conclusion that humans cannot on their own manage the Federal Acquisition Regulation, 1,897 pages of the densest prose on the planet. The only way to navigate a stifling bureaucracy that virtually everyone agrees it is broken, is to turn to the power of the machine,” writes the Washington Post. Both companies hired to help have decided to use IBM’s learning machine to help do the job. Read on, here.
And finally — The Army’s main intelligence collation system is just awful and should be replaced, says a former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn becomes the latest, and perhaps highest-profile, soldier to heap scorn upon the Distributed Common Ground System, the hard-to-use, multibillion-dollar system. “I can’t sit here today and say in my nearly five years in combat over the last decade that I ever saw it applied on the battlefield the way it was touted,” he said.Washington Times, here.